About The Kit »

After completing this kit, I must admit I really like the Strike Gundam from Gundam Seed. Sure it’s “Seed”, but it’s not over the top like most of the other Seed Mobile Suits. The Strike is a basic and well-rounded unit and is not an elaborate design, but still more modern than say the RX-78-2.

The Strike Gundam is a general-purpose/multi-role unit. It’s a Gundam at the core armed only with 2 Armor Schneider Combat Knives and some head-vulcan cannons. The “Striker-Packs are what make this unit “multi-purpose”. Basically the Strike has multiple hard-points to attach various “upgrades”. There’s the Aile pack which is basically a flight back-pack, shield, and beam rifle, the Sword pack which gives the Strike greater melee capabilities with a large beam-sword and cable-claw dealie, and the Launcher pack which is your basic BFG and rocket launchers. Pretty nifty design that way.

Because of this I wanted to design my own “Striker Pack”. I had been wanting to do a “ninja” MS for quite some time now but nothing seemed right for the base kit. The Strike had been sitting on my shelf for about a year and I had one of those “doh” moments and got to work on the “Shinobi Strike”.

My main feature was an arm-mounted sword and sheath. I played with a lot of ideas before I came to the one I built. I got the idea
from a cool blind swordsman from the PS2 game – Shinobi who had a sword strapped to his forearm.

The sword is made from a leftover gun handle, sharpened styrene strip, and misc. bits. The sheath is made from square-tube styrene
which was cut, shaped, sanded, etc…

The other idea I had was for a sensor-jamming backpack of sorts. I wanted a nice-size round part on the backpack, but nothing seemed right. Then I found a large washer and got the idea for the jammer-ring. After holding the rubber washer up behind the Strike the look of it grew on me. I went to Home Depot, bought a PVC test-cap, cut the lip off it and that’s what the ring is made from. The rest of the backpack is made from ReGZ BWS parts and Sheet Styrene sanded to taste.

The color scheme and decals reflect that this is a testing unit for prototype Striker Packs. The decals were designed by me and printed as usual by Models4U who did an excellent job as always.

About The Base »

The base is the stock launch deck that came with the MG Strike. I drilled out the little holes and added blinking LEDs using the 4060 timer chip. No movie clips yet.